Schottky merged BiCMOS structures

A new merged BiCMOS structure is presented. It incorporates a Schottky diode between the base and the collector of the n-p-n bipolar transistor. The structure offers the same reduced area advantage of merged over conventional BiCMOS, and is shown to have granted latchup immunity to BiCMOS circuits. The device simulations using HSPICE verify the latchup immunity     

Novel high speed circuit structures for BiCMOS environment

Novel high speed BiCMOS circuits including ECL/CMOS, CMOS/ECL interface circuits and a BiCMOS sense amplifier are presented. A generic 0.8 μm complementary BiCMOS technology has been used in the circuit design. Circuit simulations show superior performance of the novel circuits over conventional designs. The time delays of the proposed ECL/CMOS interface circuits, the dynamic reference voltage CMOS/ECL interface circuit and the BiCMOS sense amplifier are improved by 20, 250, and 60%, respectively. All the proposed circuits maintain speed advantage until the supply voltage is scaled down to 3.3 V     

Latch up in physically merged bipolar-MOS BiCMOS structures

A two-dimensional numerical simulation study of latch up in merged bipolar-MOS structures for BiCMOS applications is presented. The results of the simulations indicate that special precautions must be exercised in designing merged transistor structures for these applications.<>     

BiCMOS logic circuit for single-battery operation

A novel BiCMOS logic circuit is described that provides highspeed rail-to-rail operation with only one battery cell (1-1.5 V). The proposed circuit utilises a novel pull-down scheme that involves bootstrapping the base of the pull-down p-n-p bipolar junction transistor to a negative potential during the pull-down transient period. Circuit simulations have shown that the proposed circuit outperforms the transient-saturation full-swing BiCMOS and the bootstrapped bipolar circuits in terms of delay, power and cross-over capacitance for all simulated supply voltages     

BiCMOS current steering pipeline circuit technique

The authors provide a new circuit technique for pipelined high fan-in nFET trees; the circuit is based on a current mode sense and latch arrangement. The technique uses the bipolar devices present in a BiCMOS technology as both a sensitive current detector, and a low impedance driver. The logic functionality is realised by embedding complex nMOS transistor trees inside nFET latches, and connecting slave TSPC pFET latches. The resulting configuration provides spatially and functionally dense implementations which are resistant to clock skew and charge sharing     

BiCMOS circuit technology for high-speed DRAMs

A BiCMOS circuit technology featured by a novel bit-line sense amplifier has been developed. The bit-line sense amplifier is composed of a BiCMOS differential amplifier, the impedance-converting means featured by the CMOS current mirror circuit or the clocked CMOS inverter between the bit line and the base node of the BiCMOS differential amplifier, and a conventional CMOS flip-flop. This technology can reduce the access time to half that of a conventional CMOS DRAM access time. Applied to a 1-kb DRAM test chip, a new BiCMOS circuit technology was successfully verified. Furthermore, the sensitivity and area penalty of the new BiCMOS bit-line sense amplifier and future applications to megabit DRAMs are discussed     

Novel dynamic merged load technology

Two new device concepts for dynamic ratioless inverter logic circuits are presented. Very high circuit density is achieved by replacing the traditional MOS dynamic load transistor with a novel load element which is merged with the switching transistor. Both device types can be implemented with a relatively standard double polysilicon CMOS process and are ideally suited for very low-power digital signal processors, serial memories and correlators, and digital image processors.     

A sub-2.0 V BiCMOS logic circuit with a BiCMOS charge pump

A BiCMOS logic circuit with very small input capacitance has been developed, which operates at low supply voltages. A High-beta BiCMOS (Hβ-BiCMOS) gate circuit which fully utilizes the bipolar transistor features achieves 10 times the speed of a CMOS gate circuit with the same input capacitance and operating at 3.3 V supply voltage. In order to lower the minimum supply voltage of Hβ-BiCMOS, a BiCMOS circuit configuration using a charge pump to pull up the output high level of the BiCMOS gate circuit is proposed. By introducing a BiCMOS charge pump, Hβ-BiCMOS achieves very high speed operation at sub-2.0 V supply voltage. It has also been demonstrated that only a very small number of charge pump circuits are required to drive a large number of Hβ-BiCMOS gate circuits     

BiCMOS circuit technology for a high-speed SRAM

BiCMOS circuit technology for a high-speed and large-capacity ECL-compatible static RAM (SRAM) is described. To obtain high-speed and low-power operation, a decoder with a pre-main decode configuration having an ECL-interface circuit and a word driver with BiCMOS inverter are proposed. A BiCMOS multiplexer with a single emitter-follower driver is also proposed. An optimization method for memory cell array configuration is presented that minimizes the total delay time and the total power dissipation of SRAMs. Circuit simulation results show that a 64-kbit ECL-compatible SRAM with an access time of less than 7 ns and a power dissipation of less than 1 W is obtainable     

SiGe BiCMOS technology for RF circuit applications

SiGe BiCMOS is reviewed with focus on today's production 0.18-/spl mu/m technology at f/sub T//f/sub MAX/ of 150/200 GHz and future technology where device scaling is bringing about higher f/sub T//f/sub MAX/, as well as lower power consumption, noise figure, and improved large-signal performance at higher levels of integration. High levels of radio frequency (RF) integration are enabled by the availability of a number of active and passive modules described in this paper including high voltage and high-power devices, complementary PNPs, high quality MIM capacitors, and inductors. Key RF circuit results highlighting the advantages of SiGe BiCMOS in addressing today's RF IC market are also discussed both for applications at modest frequencies (1 to 10 GHz) as well as for emerging applications at higher frequencies (20 to >100 GHz).     

A 1.5-V full-swing BiCMOS logic circuit

A BiCMOS logic circuit applicable to sub-2-V digital circuits has been developed. A transiently saturated full-swing BiCMOS (TS-FS-BiCMOS) logic circuit operates twice as fast as CMOS at 1.5-V supply. A newly developed transient-saturation technique, with which bipolar transistors saturate only during switching periods, is the key to sub-2-V operation because a high-speed full-swing operation is achieved to remove the voltage loss due to the base-emitter turn-on voltage. Both small load dependence and small fan-in dependence of gate delay time are attained with this technique. A two-input gate fabricated with 0.3-μm BiCMOS technology verifies the performance advantage of TS-FS-BiCMOS over other BiCMOS circuits and CMOS at sub 2-V supply     

A high-performance, low-power complementary coupled BiCMOS circuit

Reported is a new complementary technique of full-swing BiCMOS circuit design which, though employs a p-n-p, allows the use of n-p-n-only drivers. The simulated results of this new circuit compare favorably among several representative BiCMOS circuits     

High speed BiCMOS current mode differential track-and-hold circuit

A new principle for a high speed BiCMOS differential track-and-hold circuit based on current mode processing is presented, and simulation results are given. The main characteristics are an acquisition time of 5.5 ns for 8 bit precision and a small-signal bandwidth of 1 GHz     

Novel low-voltage low-power full-swing BiCMOS circuits

A novel BiCMOS full-swing circuit technique with superior performance over CMOS down to 1.5 V is proposed. A conventional noncomplementary BiCMOS process is used. The proposed pull-up configuration is based on a capacitively coupled feedback circuit. Several pull-down options were examined and compared, and the results are reported. Several cells were implemented using the novel circuit technique; simple buffers, logic gates, and master-slave latches. Their performance, regarding speed, area, and power, was compared to that of CMOS for different technologies and supply voltages. Both device and circuit simulations were used. A design procedure for the feedback circuit and the effects of scaling on that procedure were studied and reported     

A 1.5 V full-swing BiCMOS dynamic logic gate circuit suitable forVLSI using low-voltage BiCMOS technology

This paper presents a 1.5 V full-swing BiCMOS dynamic logic gate circuit, based on a dynamic pull-down BiPMOS configuration, suitable for VLSI using low-voltage BiCMOS technology. With an output load of 0.2 pf, the 1.5 V full-swing BiCMOS dynamic logic gate circuit shows a more than 1.8 times improvement in speed as compared to the CMOS static one     

Defect structures in silicon merged epitaxial lateral overgrowth

Merging of two epitaxial lateral overgrowth fronts has been achieved to produce thin silicon-on-insulator (SOI) structures. The electronic quality of the material is generally of high quality; however, at the merger interface are defects associated with improper merging. Defects at the oxide/silicon interface and the merging interface were characterized using transmission electron microscopy. Device performance indicated the need for a process modification to improve the material quality for potential electronic applications.     

A BiCMOS speech circuit with only two external components

A telephone chip that performs all the basic functions of a speech circuit using only two external components is reported. Precision filtering based on switched-capacitor (SC) techniques is used to implement on-chip impedance termination, hybrid with sidetone cancellation, and DC characteristics starting from a single 1% external resistor. A new low-drop on-chip voltage supply generator derived from the line using an external storage capacitor is also realized. Better than 33-dB impedance matching and more than 30-dB sidetone cancellation is achieved without any external trimming. The TX linearity is better than 50 dB up to 4.4 V_p-p on the line. The chip has an active area of approximately 2.6 mm² and draws 1.5 mA of quiescent current     

A concept of analog-digital merged circuit architecture for future VLSI's

This paper describes the new analog-digital merged circuit architecture which utilizes the pulse modulation signals. By reconsidering the information representing and processing principles, and the circuit operations governed by the physical law, the new circuit architecture is proposed to overcome the limitations of existent VLSI technologies. The proposed architecture utilizes the pulse width modulation (PWM) signal which has analog information in the time domain, and be constructed with the novel PWM circuits which carry out the multi-input arithmetic operations, the signal conversions and the data storage. It has a potential to exploit the high speed switching capability of deep sub-m devices, and to reduce the number of devices and the power dissipation to one-tenth of those of the binary digital circuits. Therefore it will effectively implement the intelligent processing systems utilizing 0.5–0.2 m scaled CMOS devices.     

A BiCMOS dynamic multiplier using Wallace tree reductionarchitecture and 1.5-V full-swing BiCMOS dynamic logic circuit

The authors present a BiCMOS dynamic multiplier, which is free from race and charge-sharing problems, using Wallace tree reduction architecture and 1.5-V full-swing BiCMOS dynamic logic circuit. Based on a 1-μm BiCMOS technology, a 1.5-V 8×8 multiplier designed, shows a 2.3× improvement in speed as compared to the CMOS static one     

一种新型高速低功耗BiCMOS分频器

本文设计了一种基于BiCMOS技术的分频器,结合了双极（Bipolar）和CMOS技术的优点。作为分频器的基本单元,锁存器的工作速度直接影响了分频器的性能。通过分离跟踪差分对与交叉耦合对,并减小后者的偏置电流可以提高锁存器的工作速度。同时,合并两个锁存器的跟踪差分对可以减小分频器的功耗。采用0．8μm BiCMOS模型在Cadence SPECTRE中仿真,可以得到这种新型高速低功耗分频器的工作频率上限可以达到2．4GHz,功耗为-1．61dBm。